SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – The second Longest Walk is under way, beginning not with strides but with prayers carried up into the dawn sky above Alcatraz Island, where the first walk began three decades ago.
”We are not here starting something, we are here continuing something,” said Klee Benally, 32, a Navajo activist and musician who came from Arizona to offer a blessing on behalf of his father, a medicine man. ”We still need action today to protect our ways of life because they are still being threatened.”
About 600 people awoke sometime before 5:15 a.m., when the first ferry chugged across the icy waters of San Francisco bay, Feb. 11 to honor those who will walk portions of, or the entire, 4,400 mile journey across 11 states to Washington, D.C., to deliver the message, ”All Life is Sacred: Save Mother Earth.”
”This is the day we have been waiting for,” walk organizer and American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks, Leech Lake Ojibwe, announced over the loudspeaker of the first ferry.
It has been 30 years since San Francisco State University student Richard Oakes, Mohawk, first dove into the bay, setting off a 19-month occupation of Alcatraz that was the first in a decade of cataclysmic activism that ended a federal policy of termination.
The first walk began when 11 legislative bills were introduced in Congress in 1977 that threatened treaties and hunting and fishing rights. Soon after marchers arrived in Washington on July 15, 1978, the bills were defeated and Congress passed 50 legislative proposals to support tribal self-rule.
This year, about 300 marchers will begin walking through states including Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia from two separate routes, northern and southern. Their goal is to deliver awareness about environmental issues like global warming and unresolved Indian concerns including the desecration of sacred sites and burial grounds, and the return of ancestral remains and sacred objects from institutions including the University of California – Berkeley.
Walkers will pick up trash along the road throughout the 5-month-long journey, scheduled to end July 11.
”The calling is so great, I would sacrifice anything for it,” said Lupita Torres, 26, whose parents are from Mexico. Torres is a regular figure at California’s only tribal college, Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University, whose premise was to unite Natives from both sides of the U.S. /Mexico border. The school is one of many stops where marchers will eat and rest.
Torres will take leave from her job as a recreation leader at a San Jose garden to march the last month.
”This is a chance to be part of history,” she said. ”This seventh generation has to change the world, we don’t have a choice. Our consumption concerns me, so many people are affected by uranium mining, coal mining – all those things are archaic. We should be looking at solar, wind. How can you keep selling the land and water? Those things are sacred. But a lot of people don’t know that.”
Torres didn’t have to travel far to join the walk. But Crystal Leith, 46, a Mdewakanton Dakotah from Minneapolis, Minn., and her daughter, Amber Khan, 25, endured a three-day car ride marked by ”trials and tribulations,” Khan said. Their car broke down the first day, was almost struck the second day and they drove 1 1/2 miles on ”empty” the third.
But, ”if we weren’t meant to be here, we wouldn’t be here,” she said. ”A lot of the time we think, ‘I plan to go here or there,’ but the grandfathers know.”
Khan left behind her three-year-old son and five-year-old daughter to join the journey for five months. Her mother also left a teenager and two young sons.
”I had 38 ancestors that were hung in 1862 in the largest executions in the United States,” Leith said. ”This is for the future of our children and our grandchildren. There is a lot of sadness for our ancestors, for the things that they went through, for the desecration of our way of life, the raping of our Mother Earth and the hurt that we do to Father Sky. For this I walk.”
Leith said she has spoken to her sons every day, who were raised ”very traditional” and understand she is walking for them. ”They know it’s time consuming; but in the end, it’s worth it,” she said.
As the orange sun began to peek, walkers who had pledged to travel the entire journey were invited to the center of the circle. Wooden pipes were passed, and about 40 walkers turned to greet the sun.
Seagulls cawed loudly overhead. Nipponzan Miyohoji Buddhist monks beat on drums and chanted. White, Asian, black, Latino and Native, the walkers were all smudged with sweetgrass and sage. Some stretched their arms to the sky. Some closed their eyes, whispering soft prayers.
About 30 Japanese Buddhists have received one-week or 90-day visas to join the walk, enticed here by the words of Banks, who visited their temple in Tokyo last October. Aiko Kamada, 30, said, through a translator, she had never before known anything about Natives.
She quit her job at a bakery to join the walk. ”Dennis told the people that walking itself is a prayer,” she said. ”People are starting to forget to walk.”
For Kamada, the walk is an opportunity to learn more about Natives. ”I really feel that Native Americans really hold something in prayer that we don’t really know,” she said, For Randy Blakeley, 25, it is the fulfillment of a vision. ”I was going to go on a walk, only myself, to Argentina,” he said. ”But it wasn’t for a purpose; it was just a journey because everything in my life melted down. Then I heard about this.”
Blakeley sees the 5-month walk as a chance to ”triumph within myself.” He has ”let go” of his apartment, job and possessions, ”to completely surrender myself.” He hopes also to meet his Choctaw family during the journey.
There are more young people on this walk, which is promising, said Darryll Standing Elk, 73. A Lakota who lives in Davis, he was on the first walk and will join parts of the second with his 7-year-old granddaughter.
”It makes me feel good they’re waking up,” he said.